Who's Who in Outcome Based Education?

The Players:

WHO IS BEHIND OBE?

Describing the character, theories and objectives of Outcome
Based Education provides a basic understanding of the system that
the government and its schools are foisting upon our children and
families, like it or not. To obtain a deeper insight into OBE,
however, it is necessary to learn something about the agents of
change who are bringing OBE to you and your children. For that,
we begin at the beginning with:

B. F. Skinner, a psychologist and learning theorist who
gained prominence at mid-century. He developed the techniques of
learning (operant conditioning) based on conditioning phenomena
first analyzed scientifically by Pavlov. Skinner called his
technique his "teaching machine." Like any machine, it
can be used for good or bad, for meeting the goals of traditional
education or for the goals espoused by OBE. Skinner thus
developed the principles on which "Mastery Learning"
was developed by:

Benjamin Bloom. Mastery Learning was the original name
for the process known lately as Outcome Based Education, also
known as Performance Based Education, or Restructuring.
Educational theories used in OBE are based on Benjamin Bloom's
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. A curriculum, according to
Bloom, "...may be thought of as a plan for changing student
behavior." (p 14 of Ron Sunseri's book OBE: Understanding
the Truth about Education Reform, Questar Publishers, P.O. Box
1720, Sisters, OR 97759) Bloom called it "Mastery
Learning." Techniques for his new style of education are
based on Skinnerian behavioral psychology. It focuses on
stimulus-response conditioning, which lends itself neatly to
indoctrination. It is an approach which comes out of Pavlov's
experiments with a dog, which he conditioned to salivate when he
rang a bell. He said the mission of education is to change the
thoughts, actions and feelings of students. Bloom held that the
desired outcome is "...formulating subjective judgment as
the end product resulting in personal values/opinions with no
real right or wrong answer." Bloom's theory thus denies that
there are absolute truths and it makes everything relative. One
idea is as good as another. With no absolutes, then the goal of
good teaching is to modify the "thoughts, feelings and
actions" of the student to some replacement system supplied
by the educational system. Since that system is controlled by the
government, the change is specified by the government.

William Spady. Based in Colorado, Spady is Director of
the High Success Network and Director of the International Center
on Outcome-Based Restructuring. He is the "father" of
OBE. He works with the federal government, foundations, states
and school districts helping them implement OBE. He is a
sociologist with theories of "socialization" on global
terms. OBE is designed to prove his theories. When asked by an
interviewer if the system would promote patriotism or teach
loyalty and allegiance to one's own country, he replied, "I
don't know what Patriotic means."

According to Spady, we are faced with "a fragile and
vulnerable global environment that requires altering economic
consumption patterns and quality of life standards, and taking
collective responsibility for promoting health and
wellness." The goal of education, Spady says, has to be to
prepare students for that future. Learning results are what is
important, and his premise is that all students can learn, and it
is not important how long it takes, as long as the desired
learning takes place. Since all will learn, grades are irrelevant
in the new system. All get an "A". Competition in
schools in his estimation is a negative influence impairing
learning. He also believes that textbooks will be obsolete.

Spady's definition of an "outcome," found in the
in-service training program for OBE teachers, is "The
acceptable culminating demonstration of a significant learning
behavior." Subject knowledge and concepts are not valid
outcomes. In 1982 he observed that one of the four main goals of
Mastery Learning is a "system of supervision and control
which restrains behavior of kids. The outcome of the hidden
agenda should be the fostering of social responsibility and
compliance." These goals "transcend academics,"
and deal with attitudes and feelings. However, Spady rejected the
term "Mastery Learning" because of its monumental
failures, renaming it so that the system of OBE would not be
rejected out of hand. He found that the elite in the educational
establishment supported his ideas because they, like Spady, want
education not to teach, but to revamp society.

Shirley McCune, then senior director of the Mid-Continent
Regional Educational Laboratory doing research for the U.S.
Department of Education, was the keynote speaker at the
Governor's Conference on Education called by the elder President
Bush. She told the governors that: "What we're into is the total
restructuring of society. What is happening in America today...is
not simply a chance situation in the usual winds of change... (it
is) a total transformation of society... You can't get away from
it. You can't go into rural areas, you can't go into the
churches, you can't go into government or into business and
hide." p 15-16 "..Schools are no longer in the
schooling business, but rather in the human resource
development...we have an opportunity to develop the kind of
society we want." p 62 (References are to Sunseri's highly
recommended book.) She is currently working with the College of
Education at Arizona State University providing technical
assistance to the Arizona School to Work system.

The Mid-Continent Regional Education Laboratory is the
organization that developed the key features of the OBE
curriculum under the auspices of the U. S. Department of
Education, which under the Reagan administration was headed by T.
H. Bell who was a primary figure in OBE research and development.
Proof: G. Leland Burningham, Utah's state Superintendent of
Public Instruction, wrote to Bell in a cover letter when applying
for Federal funds to implement OBE in Utah schools. He wrote:
"I am forwarding this letter to accompany the proposal which
you recommended Bill Spady and I prepare in connection with
Outcome-Based Education." In other words, Bill Spady was
hired by Utah, at the behest of Bell, to prepare the state's OBE
proposal. Burningham goes on to say that his proposal
"centers around the detailed process" which "will
make it possible to put outcome-based education in place, not
only Utah, but in all schools of the nation... We will stand
ready for regional and national dissemination of the
Outcome-Based Education program." p 53 In other words, Bell
was the fairy godfather for Spady's work in development and
implementation of OBE nationwide. He was responsible for getting
the restructuring process moving on the highest levels of
government.

The Federal Department of Education. Following the
initiatives begun by Bell, and led by people installed in the
bureaucracy by Bell, the department has continued funding Spady
and various state activities with grants, and providing a panoply
of services to the states and individual school districts. It
sponsored development of "Educational Quality
Assessment," which is a test which students describe as
"weird." Basically the test determines the values a
child has, and measures how easy it would be to change them in
that child.

The Dept. of Education in its report, Developing Leaders for
Restructuring Schools: New Habits of Mind and Heart, says
"Restructuring (OBE) is the process of institutionalizing
essential new beliefs and values in the school mission, structure
and process. The aim of restructuring is educating all children
for productive lives." It established "lead
centers" in all states, the objective of which is to create
"dissonance" and use it as the basis for justifying
change. In other words: the plan is to get people so upset with
education that they will accept OBE as a solution to the problems
of education. Part of that plan is the No Child Left Behind law
which is so structured that a school cannot, over a span of years,
be deemed "successful." Key to that is the yearly progress
standards which are impossible to meet year after year.

The National Education Association, whose Ten Cardinal
Principles and staffers moved to the U.S. Department of Education
to participate in drawing up Goals 2000 legislation. Among those
participating in developing the Ten Cardinal Principles were
Benjamin Bloom, David Rockefeller, George Bundy, and Michael
Lerner, to name but a few. Among those participating in the work
of the Carnegie Corporation, which supplied much of the impetus to
the programs of the Department of Education, were the presidents
of the NEA and the AFT (American Federation of Teachers). That
brings us to:

The Carnegie Corporation. In 1986 it issued a report,
Teaching as a Profession: Teachers for the 21st Century. It was
basically the outline of a plan to nationalize education. Says
Phyllis Schlafly, "The game plan is to define the problem so
that it will point to a Carnegie-engineered 'solution,' establish
a 'partnership' with prominent business leaders to give
verisimilitude to Carnegie-written proposals, and then to
persuade selected governors to push Carnegie's proposals through
Congress and reluctant state legislatures." The plan was
presented to Bush's Governor's Conference in South Carolina in
1986, where Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Lamar Alexander of
Tennessee took the lead. (Clinton became president and Alexander
was appointed by Bush to head the Department of Education.) The
report calls for national certification of teachers (to get rid
of independent private and home schooling), restructuring of
schools to meet performance goals, and have nationally based
education policies. Moves towards all those goals have since
been implemented.

Included in the task force that produced the report were the
presidents of the two teachers' unions: Mary Futrell of the NEA
and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers. The
Carnegie Corporation also owns the Educational Testing Service,
which collects, scores and analyzes results of the Educational
Quality Assessment tests given to three grade levels in each OBE
state. It is joint owner and operator of the National Assessment
of Educational Progress data bank that stores the data produced
nationally by OBE. These tests are mandatory in schools, not
voluntary, although it would seem so by the literature. The
Corporation is also a primary source of funding for the Parents as
Teachers Program, which has developed family-intrusive policies
and techniques that bring parents and children into the OBE
system for control from the moment of birth.

The National Center on Education and the Economy, among
whose directors were to be found Oregon's Vera Katz, plus David
Rockefeller, Ira Magaziner and Hillary Clinton. This is an
organization originally founded, funded and controlled by the
Carnegie Corporation, and became a central funding agency for
grant money supporting OBE programs and experimentation using funds
from the Federal Government, Rockefeller Foundation and similar
sources. Recently it became a private, for-profit company working
with educators in implementation of the school reforms it designed.

John Goodlad of the University of Washington and head
of the Institute for Educational Renewal, doing research on
strategies for reaching OBE goals. He is a one-worlder and
globalist, who wrote, "Parents and the general public must
be reached... Otherwise, children and youth enrolled in
globally-oriented programs may find themselves in conflict with
values assumed in the home. And then the educational
institution...comes under scrutiny..." p 17-18 Elsewhere
Goodlad advises, ..."Most youth still hold the same values
as their parents and if we don't resocialize, our system will
decay." p18

Sharon Robinson, appointed Asst. Secretary of Education
for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the Clinton
administration. A long-time staffer of The National Education
Association, who sat with Hillary at the NEA convention and helped
facilitate OBE.

Hillary Clinton, who with David Rockefeller was a
director of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a
non-profit group formed by the Carnegie organization to study and
implement school reform. A long time and prominent
"children's advocate," she assisted the President in
making sure the proper people were brought into the federal
educational leadership.

Vera Katz, former Mayor of Portland, Oregon and former
Speaker of the Oregon House, who introduced the Oregon Education
Reform Bill and was its chief sponsor, who also is a director
(1987) of the National Center on Education and the Economy,
chairman of its Nominations Committee, and represents Oregon on
the New Standards Project. She was on the Board of the Carnegie's
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (1987). She
sponsored Carnegie-related legislation in Oregon: HB 2020 (1987),
Education Retention and Professional Development; and HB 2001
(1989) 21st Century Schools; as well as the Katz reform bill,
HB 3565, in 1991.

Norma Paulus, Oregon's former Superintendent of Public
Instruction, who was a leader in bringing OBE to Oregon and
then implementing it. In June 1992, in her foreword to Toward a
National Standard, a series of briefing papers intended to
"support the development of OBE in Oregon," she refers
to Spady. In Sept. 1992 she was a featured speaker at the America
2000 Leadership Workshop in San Francisco. Her Department of
Education participated in the national new standards project
in collaboration with the Learning Research and Development
Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Marc Tucker, sponsored 21st Century school reform in
Washington State; was senior advisor to Bill Clinton; co-director,
National Alliance for Restructuring Education; director of one of
eleven New American School design teams tasked to
"reinvent" America's schools, and president of the
Board of Trustees of the National Center on Education and the
Economy. He currently remains as head of the reinvented private
version of the NCEE.

National Center on Education and the Economy. Its
original mission was to develop policies on education and human resources.
It developed out of the Carnegie organization. Its Board of
Trustees in the early 1990s included Michael Tucker (president),
Mario Cuomo, Ira Magaziner, David Rockefeller, Hillary Clinton
and Very Katz. In 1990 this non-profit group published America's
Choice: High skills or low wages. It described the workplace as
one "managed by a small group of educated planners and
supervisors (utilizing) ....administrative procedures (that)
allow managers to keep control of a large number of workers. Most
employees under this model need not be educated. It is far more
important that they be reliable, steady and willing to follow
directions." p 29-30 Why? Because, the report states,
"More than 70 percent of the jobs in America will not
require a college education by the year 2000." p 30 What is
needed is "Workers who do what they are told, with a good
attitude," says Ron Sunseri. How do you get them, Sunseri
asks: "Start now teaching students, from the earliest
grades, the attitudes and social behaviors that will please
business and avoid a broad-based, high-quality, academic
education."

In 1992 the group put out a confidential report, The National
Alliance for Restructuring Education: Schools--and Systems--for
the 21st Century. That report states (p 33), "Our objective
is to make schools of the kind we have described as the norm, not
the exception, first in the cities and states that are Alliance
members, and later elsewhere. Getting there will require more
than new policies and different practices. It will require a
change in the prevailing culture---the attitudes, values, norms
and accepted ways of doing things---that defines the environment
that determines whether individual schools succeed or fail in the
transformation process. We will know that we have succeeded when
there are enough transformed schools in any one area, and enough
districts designed and managed to support such schools, that
their approach to education sets the norms, frames the attitudes
and defines the accepted ways of doing things in that part of the
world. There is no turning back. The question is how to bring
about this kind of cultural transformation on the scale we have
in mind....and to organize (resources) in such a way that the
growth of the new culture is geometric."

Professor Anthony Oerringer of Harvard University
contends: "Do we really want to teach people to do a lot of
sums or write...when they have a five-dollar hand-held calculator
or a word processor? ...Do we really have to have everybody
literate---writing and reading in the traditional sense?"
p28

So what are these changes to be? As implemented by education,
based on research conducted by the National Training Laboratory
associated with the National Education Association, the technique
is to supplant skill training with "sensitivity
training." The goal, according to David Jenkins of
the NTL, is "...to manipulate; (the teacher's) job is to
plan and produce behavior in order to create changes in other
people." Relative to your children, they may "appear to
behave appropriately...(but) this appearance is deceptive...
(They are) 'pseudo-healthy' persons who can benefit from
sensitivity training." p 17 The NTL warned, however, not to
be too up front about what is being done. Massel Smith of NTL
advised educators: "Couch the language of change in the
language of the status quo." p 17

Thomas Sticht, a member of the US Secretary of Labor's
Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, noted that many
companies have moved their operations to places with cheap,
poorly educated labor forces because "the dependability of a
labor force and how well it can be managed and trained---not its
general educational level" is what is important. He added,
"Ending discrimination and changing values, are probably
more important than reading and moving low-income families into
the middle class." p 29

Sunseri Comments: "What Sticht is really saying is that
we need more low-wage laborers in America. The only way to keep a
pool of them available is to be sure that most students don't get
educated. As long as the masses are poor and uneducated, the
small cadre of highly educated, creative people can control them
and have the kind of life they want."p 29 That this paved the
way for public acquiesance to the outcomes of NAFTA and
GATT in about the year 2000 is an interesting coincidence.

Bill Clinton in 1979 initiated the
"restructuring" reform of Arkansas schools and chose
the bureaucracy to run it. After fifteen years of the system, the
schools are presently 45th in literacy and 44th in standard
achievement tests. He also started the "Governor's
School" as a model for statewide school reform. The school
takes the best and brightest students in the state and send them
to a special Summer school, six weeks long, with 350 to 400
students attending each year. Mark Lowry, former director of
publicity for the school, says the goal is to identify the four
or five exceptional students suited to future political careers.

Lowery reports that the school does not deal in traditional
academic excellence, but political correctness. It uses
thoroughly scripted "brainwashing" techniques,
including isolation from the outside world, to instill moral
relativity and disintegration of family values. Students reported
that they were fed a curriculum that focused on gays and gay
rights, radical homosexuality, "all the things my parents
said were wrong." Others reported, "We were encouraged
to do what we felt like doing, to be hostile to Western
Civilization and culture."

Lowery stated, "The greatest influence of the Governor's
School is to promote the thought with these students that to be
considered an intellectual by your peers...you have to be a
liberal thinker." The school, he said, "invokes not
only philosophy, but political thought, and that is the
underlying message that permeates the whole six weeks. This is
not teaching or learning, but indoctrination."

A student reported that the main course at the school, two
hours every day, was "Views of Man." It dealt with
radical feminist, leftist ideology, and other radical thinking.
The student said it was "warped," presenting one
viewpoint only. Its goal was to "Convince students that they
are the intellectual and cultural elite." It taught that it
is OK to challenge authority because "you are part of the
elite, and your parents wouldn't understand all this. As the
elite, it doesn't matter what ordinary people believe or want.
You know what is good for them."

Parents reported that their children came back from the school
"terribly changed." One parent reported that it took
two years of psychological deprogramming to restore their child
to normal. Another said that her son committed suicide, and
probably would not have but for the school. Another student
reported his repeated fantasies of committing suicide, even to
the point of writing a suicide note, because he loved the school
so much he didn't want to be back in the real world.

Unfortunately, the "real world" of tomorrow is the
world of OBE, courtesy of the Clintons and Katz, the Bushes and
Bells, Paulus and Roberts, and most recently John Kitzhaber and
Brady Adams, all loyal Democrats and Republicans, who cozied up
to the elitists who understand better than you what you ought do
with your life and how to raise your children.

For your children it will be a life of lowered expectations
and diminished returns.

B. K. Eakman, in Educating for the New World Order, quotes
William Bonner, Attorney for the Rutherford Institute:
"While the public has assumed it retains its historic input
into education on a local school district level, in fact
education has been progressively federalized, with the bold new
America 2000 as the ultimate expression of the consolidation of
power over education directed from Washington. The revised
Chapters 3, 5, and 6 respond to Washington's demand that the
states effect strict compliance with federal regulation in
exchange for federal dollars. Freedom, diversity and local
control are being increasingly sacrificed in that exchange."

"Undergirding this federalization of education has been a
massive invasion of the family and the rights of individual
students through curricula utilizing psychological programming
and experimentation, as well as a broad spectrum of behavior
modification techniques. Data periodically gathered through
invasive testing within the affective domain has then, through
the illegal demand for students' social security numbers...been
compiled on computer systems storing vast amounts of intimate and
private information on our children and youth, in violation of
their constitutional rights...

"The traditional interests and rights of parents have
been trampled upon, as educators have proceeded on the
proposition that professionals know better than parents how to
raise children.... The results create a further attack upon the
already weakened family units in our sachet. Both the assessment
tests and the related curriculum increasingly reinforce the
message that conformity to government-established values and
attitudes is the key to future success in life...

"The public does not understand that the government is
establishing criteria to assess attitudes, values and opinions,
nor do they understand that a 'planned course' will be introduced
to 'remediate' attitudes, values and opinions not meeting
government standards." p258-9

This is our future, compliments of the elite class of
government bureaucrats and multi-national corporate managers and
bankers who have given us OBE for the sake of the "Brave New
World" they have in mind.